Saturday 12 May 2012

Made In Chelsea

     One of the perils of living in a cage continues to be not having access to the remote control. My twitterchums will be familiar with the tussle for control at Degu HQ over said device. Being of an intellectual nature myself, I have a preference for BBC4 and the veritable cornucopia of documentaries with which I can improve my little caviomorph mind. There is nothing quite as sonorous as a well-educated individual communicating eloquently about their field of expertise.
     You may wonder where I am going with this. Well, here goes…
     The Human – who happens to be the worst cook since “Arsenic Annie” served up her famous prune mousse – rather enjoys watching Saturday Kitchen Live (and also salivating over James Martin, although that is a rather different story). I hate Saturday Kitchen Live more than any of the other drivel that she watches on a regular basis and so I have developed a new trick: I squawk, squeak and bark loudly when it is on and until she changes the channel. Being of an essentially lazy disposition, she can only manage to press the “channel up” button three times before her podgy little fingers are exhausted.
     Thus we alight upon Channel 4. This is how it came to pass that, at Degu HQ, we watched Made In Chelsea, which is broadcast on the aforementioned channel, one Saturday morning.
     For those of you who haven’t seen Made In Chelsea, let me give you a quick summary. A group of over-privileged singletons in their late twenties move from party to party in various degrees of undress without ever going to work and making noises such as “yah yah”, “rah rah” or “jollybah bah rah yah rah” while swilling copious amounts of champagne. The girls all rather resemble horses and the chaps put me in mind of the Jack Wills catalogue.
     These young people are constantly in flux between attending openings or launch parties and sitting on yachts in the Mediterranean, they all seem to be employed by each other in some semi-incestuous manner, and if they aren’t currently in a relationship with one another then they have been at some point. In fact, in the last three episodes, all two of the girls have talked about is their relationship history with a couple of the boys.
     As part of my research I did try to learn the names of the characters. However, with one exception, the girls are all painfully thin and have blonde hair. Actually, I had been pondering how one particular young lady had such an extensive wardrobe when I clocked on to the fact that Caggie, Millie and Cheska are, in fact, three different people. I just thought it was the same girl but that she had truly appalling luck with men (which is why she kept talking about different ones that she liked).
     This programme had me reaching for Marx and Engels on the one paw and the remote control with the other. The week in which Ollie bought a sports car that was painted as a Union Jack was particularly frustrating, with Spencer sitting next to him saying that it was rather flamboyant and didn’t Ollie want something more low key. To which the response was that if Ollie was buying a flash car then he dashed well wanted to be noticed in it.
     This programme is like an homage to the rich, I thought initially. But the more I watched the more I started to question this. There is something strangely compelling about a programme where the people featured have so much and yet still have the same flaws as anybody else. Not one of them seems to be able to maintain a good relationship, they have the same petty arguments and fallings out with their friends, they still worry about having spots and putting on weight, and they stress about work. They just do all that through plummy vowels and within some of the most expensive real estate in Britain.
     At the outset, I wrote how much I enjoy the sound of the well-educated communicating their knowledge in a rhetorically sound way.  In Made In Chelsea, where they may be well-educated, they certainly struggle to communicate effectively. The pauses within the dialogue are painful. It’s worse than sitting through a school play where none of the thespians involved bothered to learn the script, but at least in that scenario you know that they are capable of learning it, something which I wonder about the cast here.
     All in all, I’m glad that I was made in Pets At Home and not Chelsea.

No comments:

Post a Comment